Saturday, 17 October 2009

Distant Haleakala II

Another shot of Haleakala on Maui, this one taken on the following evening from the other one and from a slightly different location although still on the summit! To the left is Keck 2 and on the right is the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility.

Again this was taken well after sunset but I was in a real hurry yesterday evening - it was going to be a busy night and we started off badly with an electronics problem that we had to address in order to obtain decent data. While we were attempting something, I dashed outside, mainly to check the conditions before it was too dark to tell and quickly shot a couple of photos of the most interesting thing I saw. No time for a tripod even, I just had to improvise! These two images were then stitched together to create this small panorama of an evening view from MaunaKea.

It was a fantastic night in the end, it was very dark due to the new moon and the Milky Way was strung above our heads across the entire sky and easily visible to the naked eye. If only I had a decent low-light camera!

Just for a change I managed to take a few pictures at sunrise this morning. Shock horror. I don't think that'll happen again for a while. One or two of those to come later...